Despair And Hope: The Postapocalyptic Redemption In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

The contemporary American writer Cormac Mc Carthy describes a surviving journey of an unnamed father and his son in the postapocalyptic world in his novel The Road. The death of language, the termination of history, and the disappearance of individual reflect the despair and horror in the postapocalyptic world. However, the father and the son struggle and fight for the hope of redemption in their road. The paper is based on Fredrick Jameson’s postmodern space theory to analyze the novel.The rapid development of science and technology directly leads to the coming of the postmodern space. Thus, the postapocalyptic world is the outcome of the continuous expansion of the industrialization and postmodern capitalism.In the postapocalyptic world, human civilization is shattered into pieces and the semantic ground that language is rooted in no longer exists. Signifier and signified do not correspond with each other any more, which leads to the death of language.Besides, since humans can not turn to the scheme of history to map themselves temporally as usual, they find that they approach a society within which the historicity is gone. People in the barren land can not get any connection with their past, which turns some of them to live in the perpetual presents, doing things merely from the instinct desire. What’s more, being unable to locate oneself, the individual feels disorientation and loses the control of the outer surroundings individually, which shows that people won’t survive merely by their own efforts in this world.“Cognitive mapping” is the way to comprehensively grasp the postmodern space according to Jameson, that is to say, individuals should cognitively map the world. It is a kind of representation and reproduction. In the novel, the father actively adjust to the new environment and pass down the hope and the love to his son by both his words and deeds. With a warm heart and hope passed down by his father, the boy meets some good guys and will go on the journey with a harmonious relationship with the outer surroundings. The boy’s road in postapocalyptic stands as a new civilization which is a symbol of the hope and redemption in the postapocalyptic world.The Road conveys its warning of the industrial society and shows Mc Carthy’s deep concern about the development of human society and the existing state of human beings. The road, in this novel, just stands as a kind of redemption, representation and a way to remap the new world with hope and love.